May 31 (Bloomberg) -- The last time a major hurricane hit
the U.S., pounding beaches and towns with winds of more than 111
miles per hour, was the record storm year of 2005.

“We have never gone six” years without a major strike,
said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center
in Miami. “That is a record I would like to establish, but
that’s not up to me, but up to nature.”

In 2005, which saw 15 hurricanes and seven major storms of
Category 3 or higher, Katrina struck near New Orleans, killing
at least 1,836 people. Katrina and Rita caused $91 billion in
damage, destroyed 115 energy platforms in the Gulf and shut down
95 percent of Gulf oil production and almost 30 percent of U.S.
refining capacity, according to government reports.

As the 2011 season opens tomorrow, forecasts call for the
Atlantic to be more active than in an average year, which
produces 11 named storms. The Atlantic has a 65 percent chance
of producing 12 to 18 storms, with six to 10 of them becoming
hurricanes, according to the U.S. Climate Prediction Center.

The last hurricane to hit the U.S. was Ike, a Category 2
storm, in 2008. There hasn’t been a three-year period without a
U.S. hurricane strike since the 1860s, according to Andover,
Massachusetts-based Weather Services International, a software
maker owned by the Weather Channel.

Planet’s Worst Storms

Hurricanes are the most powerful and destructive storms on
the planet, inflicting $152.4 billion in insured losses in the
U.S. from 1990 to 2009 and accounting for 45.2 percent of the
country’s catastrophic losses in the same time period, according
to the Insurance Information Institute in New York.

This year, the industry may be under greater strain because
of large losses inflicted by record-setting tornadoes that have
killed more than 500 people and destroyed at least $3 billion to
$6.5 billion of insured property, said Robert Hartwig, president
and economist for the insurance institute.

Hurricanes, which are most active during the six-month
season than runs from June 1 through Nov. 30, are a threat to
Florida orange growers, who produce the second-largest crops
behind Brazil, and Gulf of Mexico oil and gas platforms and
refineries. The Gulf accounts for 31 percent of U.S. oil output
and 43 percent of refining capacity.

Last year, while tying for the third-most active season on
record, the U.S. was protected from major damage by a trough, or
an elongated area of low pressure, that helped keep all the
hurricanes and all except one tropical storm from striking the
U.S., said Jim Rouiller, a senior energy meteorologist at
Planalytics Inc. in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

Pulling Storms In

The trough is setting up this year across the Mississippi
Valley, and if it stays there, it’s “going to act as a magnet
to pull these storms into the southeastern U.S. or mid-Atlantic,” Rouiller said.

“We will be faced with a much higher threat of a land-falling hurricane,” Rouiller said.

The position of this year’s Bermuda High, a semi-permanent
area of high pressure over the North Atlantic, may also drive
storms closer to the U.S., said Paul Pastelok of AccuWeather
Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania.

Pastelok said forecasters at AccuWeather believe the high
will position itself in such a way that more U.S. land strikes
are possible.

Not all forecasters are willing to make that bet.

Tricky Predictions

Predicting where storms will make landfall before they form
is virtually impossible, said Feltgen. And Jeff Masters, founder
of Weather Underground Inc., said the weather patterns that
steer hurricanes can’t be predicted months in advance.

“There is no telling what the steering currents are going
to do this year,” Masters said.

The one aspect that all forecasters agree on is that La
Nina, the cooling of the Pacific Ocean, won’t be in play. The
Australian Bureau of Meteorology declared the La Nina event over
and said the Pacific has returned to neutral.

A storm gets a name when its winds reach 39 miles per hour
(63 kilometers per hour) and becomes a hurricane when winds hit
74 mph. There are five hurricane categories as classified by the
Saffir-Simpson scale, with damage increasing by a factor of four
for each step up, according to the hurricane center.

While storm names are recycled every six years, this year
will have names that weren’t on the list in 2005, said Feltgen.
After that season, five names were retired, among them Katrina,
“the most number of storms names we retired in one year,”
Feltgen said.

Two names, Igor and Tomas, were retired by the World
Meteorological Organization’s hurricane committee last year.

“We’re recycling the Katrina-year names,” said Masters,
in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “It has been five years without a major
hurricane. You could say were due but that doesn’t increase the
odds.”